I still have more to tell you about children’s centre. Mum and Dad seemed to have a skill that they naturally obtained that hardly anyone it Russia actually had – speaking English.

Somehow, lots of Russians had got it into their heads that you can buy a language. Unfortunately, you can’t entirely buy and education and even more unfortunately money can actually play a part in your education. Anyway, people would come to Mum and Dad a lot hoping to buy English – including Natalya Ignatevna. She paid Mum for her time teaching kids at children centre English. I think this mainly happened when my brother was going there, but it might have also been when I was going there too. I can remember when Mum was laying some sort of activity and she said, “cover your eyes”. I don’t remember what game it was, but a lot of kids’ games involve that. Some kids closed their eyes, but Mum repeated cover, gesturing by lifting her hands up to her face. It’s important to learn the difference even if that does not make a difference in the game.

With all that Natalya Ignatevna had done to help me learn Russian, I returned to favour, mostly because she was very curious about English. It is very interesting though when she had granted your request, and she says a long and polite “pleeease”.

The thing is, in Russian, we don’t differentiate between please and your welcome. So when you try and teach the English word for “пожалуиста” – pozhaluistah (please/your welcome) you give them the word for one half of it and they assume it means both please and your welcome. It is quite hard to teach this that there are two different words here, but that is okay. They both indicate the same thing - “for the sake of goodness and mercy”.

Another game we played happened on a birthday. We would all make a circle around the birthday girl or boy, hold hands, stretch out the circle, press in closer the person in the centre, all trot to the right, all trot to the left. The whole time, we sang a happy song. At the end, we wold ask the birthday boy or girl how much she loved her friends. It really was a signal for him or her to choose one person to happily dance with. And they would reply – of course I love you all, but I love- and then someone’s name – most of all. Not particularly, that was just what we said. I’m not sure why. I always wanted to be that person. As I grew closer friends with the children there, I finally had my turn. I think it was Nadya that chose me. I never got to be a birthday girl though because my birthday was in the summer – during the school holidays.

Remember our friend Tim I told you about? Well anyway, he and his wife What’s-Her-Name. Iris? Yeah, that seems right. Anyway, they had had two boys around my age named Stevie and Jonathan. When I prayed for an apple tree, that was when we were staying at their house. Come to think of it, that makes sense now. We stayed there for a while before we moved to out new home. Which is probably why I have a strange memory of Mum praying for me while a was on the top of a bunk bed – since Patrick was too young for a normal bed at the time.

I have happy memories playing with them. But being boys, they were very energetic and strange in their thinking (no offence to boys. We are just different). They told me that cursive writing was actually just scribbling. Now this sounds hilarious, but back then that made a lot of sense. After all, who could understand handwriting? All it did was make you look fancy.

Anyway, they inspired a new hobby for me as a little kid – collecting rocks. We were I a sand pit playing when one of the boys told me about it. It sounded like a lot of fun, so soon enough I gave it a go too.  I would find all the little stones with no merit or at all being unique, gather them in a fistful, and dump them on the bench at the playground. Unfortunately, Dad would not let me keep them all. So, then the next task would be to sort through them and decided which rocks were brighter, less shabbier, rare. But in my eyes they were all special.

This playground had these amazing swings which were so much fun. I enjoyed sitting on them and singing, processing my thoughts. They are still my favourite thing about playgrounds. A playground that does not have them is not even half as interesting. It seems to be the only part of a playground that adults do not grow out of , because sometimes you can see a weary mum holding her baby and moving the swing steadily – and secretly enjoying it.

There was also a very old sandpit. You could tell this because it had slowly accumulated enough sand to make a hill. Kids would play with the sand, empty it out. Then people would need to get more sand, toss it in. Then kids throw out the new sand and eventually the sand pit is buried. So, then you build a new sand pit on top of the growing hill. And so on and so forth - until you get a hill in a playground.

Between the swings and the sand pit, there was a patch of grass. One time I found little Styrofoam balls in the grass. I asked mum what they were. She just said they were Styrofoam but never explained what that was. So, I resolved that they were the toys of little bug children. That made a lot of sense, especially since they didn’t seem to leave for a while, and were put away by the bug in the same place each time (because they were stuck in the dirt)

With a little imagination, rock can become gemstones, birthday girls princesses, and rubbish the insect’s toys.